Anti-Duke Manifesto-The Complete Hate

Two years ago, Coach K was the subject. Not once did the program even hint at the possibility of the man having anything short of a model citizen profile. Ignoring the dirty laundry discussed in this writing alone, the entire piece suggested that K was a miracle worker who moved to lowly Durham, North Carolina in order to resurrect a struggling basketball program the same program that played in the national championship game two seasons before his arrival. He was never confronted about his poor sportsmanship, his oft-criticized hypocrisy, the underhanded manner in which he lures players to his school by securing jobs for parents, his controversial television ads, or his gutless buck passing. The only criticism was one from K himself. He faulted himself for underestimating how ‘popular’ he would become after winning his first two national titles. He explained how he attempted to meet all of the endless demands for public appearances, which triggered the exhaustion that forced him to quit the 1994-95 season just as the teams season started its way down the toilet. That Ks only admitted fault from that season was underestimating his perceived popularity says it all.

It is bad enough that the sports media fails to research the mans background sufficiently to expose these easily discoverable facts. But, thanks to the New York Times, we now know that ignorance and sloppy journalism is not the root cause of the medias misplaced adoration. In his ‘Follow Me’ article, Times writer Michael Sokolove rambled on about the leadership virtues of Coach K, actually following select chapters from Ks book in the process. On the first page of the article, Sokolove cited the initial version of this writing as an example of the ‘vitriol’ thrown at Coach K. Sokolove presumably read the paper, as he briefly discussed two scattered points and actually ran a word count on it. Nevertheless, he quickly dismissed the decades of factual evidence and undeniable statistics as the stuff of envy. ‘What the manifesto demonstrates, mainly,’ writes Sokolove, ‘is how satisfying it can be to hate success and, even more so, to hate success linked to virtue.’ Sokolove made no attempt to refute any of the points made, other than to state that it ’seems far-fetched’ to note that much of Dukes success is due to its astounding free throw advantages.